No need to record videos with strangers in public

It is said that nobody likes a fairy tale. So why do so many of us seem so eager to catch a random person behaving suspiciously in public, record video of whatever they're doing, and blast it on the internet?

This week, TikTok is awash with domestic drama on an airplane, a cramped environment that reliably turns people into weird hall monitors as they record every possible breach of passenger etiquette. But it wasn't about reclining seats, or someone biting their nails, or even someone refusing to move so a family could sit together. Instead, a TikTok user was secretly recording the cozy vibes between a man in the hallway and a woman he apparently met at the airport bar. The TikToker assumed, based on his wedding band, that the guy was cheating on his wife — and she wanted to expose him.

“If this man is your husband flying @United Airlines flight 2140 from Houston to New York, he's probably staying with Katie tonight,” she captioned a since-deleted video, explaining that she had saw the two meet and start drinking together before boarding and that they had arranged for the woman to change seats to be next to him. She gave a number of identifying details she had heard from the man, including where he lived and the age of his daughter, although she was unable to ascertain his name. He finished the caption encouraging a crowdsourced survey: “Make your TikTok. #findthewife #cheatinghusbands.”

The masses obeyed, taking no time to provide his name, his wife's name and their Facebook pages, which appear to have disappeared after both were inundated with messages from people who had seen the video. (Three days later, it had been played more than 30 million times.) Whatever emotional effect this embarrassing virality had is unknown, but it's also decidedly unimportant to those who derived entertainment from the scandal and the efforts to dispel the mystery. These real lives would get in the way on their own fun.

There's no need to defend marital infidelity if it actually happened, not even PDA on a commercial flight. There is something toxic, however, about acting as an unsolicited agent of a larger societal surveillance apparatus operating with smug righteousness. It's obvious that every time a social media pole organizes itself to take down a criminal defendant and manages to track down the target, they're congratulating themselves on being better detectives than the FBI. The media that gleefully collects this material is no better, praising it amateur sleuths and echoing comments hailing the vigilant videographers who made “the Lord's work.”

The principle that flows from this kind of thinking—that we should live as if our every public wrong can be virtuously amplified to a much larger audience for the purposes of ritual shaming—is troubling and toxic. In a pre-smartphone era, such incidents would simply be the texture of everyday experience, perhaps pointless gossip to share with a friend or partner after the fact. Now, of course, each is possible content: alternative thrills for your followers, the dopamine rush of engagement for yourself.

While the debate surrounding how phones have or haven't changed our fundamental humanity is wide-ranging and ongoing (journalist Taylor Lorenz recently hosted episode of the podcast You're wrong in which he argued, not without some backlash, that they aren't really destroying the minds of the younger generations), it's clear that this is no way to live. You cannot terrorize a society into having morals and ethics with the threat of online defamation. In the meantime, we shouldn't overlook the personal benefits of minding our own business, maintaining boundaries, and abandoning the urge to treat what happens in the ear as a true crime saga.

A 2021 editorial from New York Times summed up the academic research on polarization in America with a headline that has since served as an invaluable meme:We should all know less about each other.” The idea, put forward by academics in the fields of sociology and communications, was that the more exposure to politics we find distasteful on platforms like Facebook and Twitter makes us more intolerant of anyone who pushes them. There may be a parallel lesson to be learned from the invasion complex that has us spying on strangers: delving into their petty failings and turning them into entertainment leaves viewers more cynical, certain that everyone who walks this planet is foul harboring narcissists. little secrets.

There is nothing to be done about the voyeuristic nature of our species. We are observers. we will always choose the unusual, the not quite right, and quite often we will begin to pay more attention to it. Taking down photos or footage of those we believe violate a code of conduct seems almost like a way to justify and validate such viciousness: Isn't that important? Shouldn't we take action? However, however one may justify it (for example, claiming to be acting in the best interests of a betrayed spouse), there is no compelling reason. You are still the person dramatizing the wrongdoing of an unknown party to garner those likes, replies and shares. Stop crusading — there are a million times when it's better to be a spectator.